


Forever and a Day

by Selkit



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Control Ending, F/M, Immortality, Post-Canon, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-06 00:22:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1837570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selkit/pseuds/Selkit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She can pacify a million Reapers with a single thought, but she’s powerless to stop a bullet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forever and a Day

**Author's Note:**

> Written in response to a prompt from an angsty-fic meme on Tumblr: "Look at me - just breathe, okay?" Many thanks to electricshoebox for sending me the prompt! I'd been wanting to write a post-Control fic for months, but could never quite make it work until now.

It starts to get easier for them as the years roll on. She can tell, watching them from her perch in the stars, with a thousand Reapers gathered in the palm of her hand. Year by year, she fades from their thoughts a little more. Not forgotten, just…absent. Out of sight, out of mind, reduced to a handful of memories-turned-legends and a monument on the Presidium, erected halfway between the Conduit and the krogan statue. 

(It’s a decent memorial, she has to admit: a fierce stone woman with arms upraised, the Earth cradled in her palms, her expression frozen in eternal determination. She directs a few of the smaller Reapers to assist with its construction. The woman she once was always appreciated a good bit of irony, after all.)

Yet even as the galaxy moves on without her, she isn’t gone, not truly. She’s there with them all, watching. She sees Liara’s sleepless nights before a kaleidoscope of computer monitors, Miranda’s quiet conversations with Oriana, Tali’s joyful grin as she kneels next to Rannoch seedlings, Wrex’s piggyback rides for dozens of delighted krogan children.

But she sees Garrus most of all.

He buries his grief under an endless tide of to-do lists, but she sees it in the stony set of his mandibles, in his polite but short responses to condolences. He throws himself into the work of rebuilding a devastated galaxy, but she sees him when he abandons his bunk and steps outside in the middle of the night. She sits next to him while he stares up at the stars, and though she can’t read his thoughts, eternities will pass before she forgets how to read his face.

_I know_ , she murmurs, and in those moments she would give up all the control in the world to be able to grip his hand. She closes her eyes, remembering the awkward perfection of five fingers twined with three. _It’s an awfully empty galaxy for me, too._

But he doesn’t hear her. He never does.

* * *

Slowly the galaxy knits back together, but it doesn’t heal just right. In the years of aftermath, the dregs of the universe grow bolder, bandits and slavers taking advantage of distracted governments to prey on colonies left adrift in the chaos. And because he’s Garrus, he picks up a rifle and goes to fight, Archangel’s old wings spreading like shelter over the galaxy’s defenseless and downtrodden.

She finds him there on a backwater world, and he isn’t careless, but neither is he lucky. He lies contorted on his back, staring up at the sky, mercenary corpses littering the ground around him. Cobalt blood spreads in an eerie reprise of a rocket launcher and a grimy Omega floor, and she drops to her knees beside him. Not for the first time, she remembers the arrogant AI in a child’s guise, and she curses its incomplete definition of Control.

She can pacify a million Reapers with a single thought, but she’s powerless to stop a bullet.

“Shepard,” Garrus groans, but he isn’t looking at her. He keeps staring up at the sky, where dusk is falling, the stars beginning to appear. A cough rattles his ribcage, and little blue flecks foam around his mandibles. “Hope you’ve got a drink ready for me up at that bar.”

_No_ , she howls into the wind. _There is no bar, Garrus. Not for me. There’s only here, and the galaxy, and eternity. Don’t go where I can’t see you anymore._

He coughs again, weakly. She wants to press her hands to his ribs, to do something to stem the gush of blood, but she knows it would be just as useless as trying to twine her fingers with his.

_Look at me_ , she commands, pleads. _Dammit, Garrus, look at me. Just breathe, okay?_

But he doesn’t hear her.

He never does.


End file.
